Mommy Issues

A question came up recently, about something I considered a moot point. But maybe it isn't so moot. The answer seems fairly obvious, at least to my rational mind, but my feels taunt me with doubts. 

This is the question: Do I come out to my mother?

This would be through a proxy, naturally. Either my father or brother. My rational thinking and all my feels are on the same page about doing it directly: I'm never speaking to her again. Well, there is a tiny part of me that wants to directly tell her off about how she interfered with my discovery of myself. Tell her off about a lot of things, actually.

I have a lot of history with my mother. Most people do, but by history I mean history. She has many guises, she's had many more, and I have dramatic history with all of them.

Remnants

Remnants of my twisted inner life.

I've mentioned my intrusive thoughts before - the sick, twisted thoughts that would obsessively take over my mind and wouldn't leave until I, to be blunt, masturbated to them. These left me, seemingly for good, when I started hormone therapy. But in the time from age 14 to 31, I'd accumulated quite a collection of related images. See, I wasn't the only person with such sick thoughts, and plenty of others drew or rendered representations of them. I savored and collected these representations, to the tune of 6.5 GB compressed.

I had forgotten I had kept these, in a single one-piece RAR archive. I only remembered because of the pedo priest with his 131,000 pedophilic images. Let me be clear: there is nothing pedophilic in my archive. I am not a pedophile and never have been, even in the worst throes of my sickest intrusive thoughts. Just to be clear. It just reminded me of it.

I packed these images (and stories) up in that archive, and deleted the uncompressed files, when I felt the intrusive thoughts leave me 7 months ago. But I kept the archive. Initially it was because I thought I might want to decompress it and view the images again in the future - that the intrusive thoughts would come back. But now, knowing almost certainly that they're gone for good (as long as I keep estrogen instead of testosterone in my veins), I still keep them. Why?

I feel like that lone file - CAKE.rar - is a reminder to me. A reminder of what I once was, of what my mind is like with the wrong hormones. Of what I am naturally, without medical intervention. I never intend to open or decompress it. But seeing it, sitting there, it won't let me forget. And I feel like I have to remember the consequences of not being my true self.

I probably should delete it. No, I know I should delete it. But for some reason I can't bring myself to. It feels like deleting a part of myself. A part I absolutely despise and run away from, but a part of me nonetheless.

Someone please talk me into deleting it. Because I just can't bring myself to on my own.

Expectations, Excitement, and Disappointment (pointless ramblings)

I have some bad habits. Things that aren't good for my mental health. I won't get into all of them; the relevant ones here:

• I look at /r/transtimelines
• I look at /r/transpassing
• I read other MtF girls' accounts of their progress
• I let myself get excited about every little bit of my own progress

These habits conspire to set me up for guaranteed disappointment. I've been on hormone therapy for 6 months now; my boobs are AA (yes, it's a real size, smaller than A) and show no signs of continuing to grow. The fat distribution on my face and in my body is still fairly masculine - especially in my body. 

Don't get me wrong, I've made a lot of progress. But sometimes it doesn't feel that way. When my nipples started to grow, I jumped with joy; that just prepared me to despair when they stopped. Same with my boobs, which I'm now despairing over for their lack of soreness, a sure sign of growth. I was just so excited when I could say "I have boobs," it never occurred to me that it wouldn't be constant growth. Even though I know it's in fits and starts, I'm constantly afraid this is as big as they'll get. I can see changes to my face when I compare pictures, but when I look in the mirror I still see a man. My belly flab isn't going much of anywhere, least of all to my hips. Even though I've seen tables and graphs of normally expected timelines, and I see that I'm basically within normal range (though these expected values put hormone changes as happening for 4 years - I want to be ready for SRS long before that, dammit!), I despair.

My other bad habits get in the way of feeling good about that sometimes. I see timelines and read about progress where girls are looking totally female at 6 months, or have B cup breasts before this point. I look down at my AA's and I'm not a happy girl. I see timelines where 2 months of progress puts my 6 months to shame. I rationally know these are outliers, but inside they hurt.

I get frustrated. Girls talk about their endocrinologists giving them 8mg of estradiol a day; mine won't let me go higher than 4mg and I worry what I'm missing out on, how much better my progress could be. Mine started me at 50mg of spironolactone; 100mg sounds like it's a more typical starting dose. And again, I wonder what I missed out on in those first months with all that testosterone still afflicting me.

Of course, the second my boobs start hurting again, the second my nipples become tender again, I will light up in incandescent optimism. And when it stagnates, just look at a few timelines and I'm back to despair. That's how I'm feeling down after all the excitement at 6 months. And again, excited going to 200mg of the spiro, feeling my boobs get a little soreness, now down again after it goes away.

I get excited and it sets me up for disappointment. I see better-than-average timelines and it sets me up for disappointment. I hope too hard and it sets me up for disappointment. 

I should learn to expect nothing, and then be happy (not excited) with everything I get.

/angst

Identity Crisis

Warning: Wangst ahead

tl;dr: Suddenly having trouble calling myself female instead of transfemale.

*sigh* I'm having an identity crisis. I choose to identify as just plain female, not transfemale, But now I'm not sure I can do that. I want to be just female, but wanting doesn't make it so. I was never socialized as a girl, I didn't have the experience of growing up as a girl or of living my adult life as one. The maleness of that is a part of me, however much I wish I didn't have it or wish I could jettison it.

Can I ever legitimately claim to just be female, not specifically transfemale? My therapist assures me that after 7-10 years or so (so when I'm 40, ugh) I'll reach a "post-trans" state where it doesn't even occur to me that I'm trans. I have my doubts about that; we'll see. For now, I just don't know that I can claim to actually be what I merely want to be.

This didn't quite come out of nowhere. I've been having crazy dreams this week. Some of them really drove this home for me, either because someone rejected my femininity and insisted I was male (which robbed me of my female voice and features - them saying it made them correct), or because I dreamed I was a cis woman and waking up felt like being snapped out of a happy delusion.

Still, as a transwoman, I'm a subcategory of just plain woman, not something separate and distinct. I just feel now like "female" carries too strong a connotation of cis or at least early transition. Not being either, having lived my whole life male, I feel like it's a lie, or at least misleading.

Not changing it on Facebook, though. I have to cling to the hope and desire to one day not be 'that trans girl' (which probably says more about my own insecurities than anyone's perception of me). *sigh*